Horizontally Scaling Drupal

Managing a handful of production Drupal sites is pretty straight forward. When you start deploying or trying to manage hundreds or even thousands of sites, things get complicated very quickly. Dave Hall will explain how he has used Aegir and Drupal to deploy and manage thousands of production websites.

In 2009, Dave was engaged to develop a collaboration platform for a French company operating in the chemical industry. His solution was a large Drupal 6 multi site instance, compromising almost 2100 sites. Rollouts and updates take time at this scale. The final production deployment of the sites took around 50 hours to complete, rolling out a security update takes around 24 hours.

Dave will discuss some of the Drupal tools he used to manage this large deployment, including aegir, drush, install profiles, packaging and features. Rather than detail the client specific implementation, Dave's presentation will provide generalised advice on scaling Drupal horizontally. Attendees will be able to utilise this information in their production environments to obtain significant efficiency and spend less time managing their infrastructure.